Was trolling CodePlex today and noticed that those Patterns and Practices cats just released a neat little set of short architecture guides that cover a few specific architectural areas including the Agile architecture method, web application architecture, mobile architecture, rich Internet application (RIA) architecture, rich client architecture, and finally, service architecture.
The service guide is a fairly useful little document that spells out a few important things. It covers different considerations for SOA services, data services and workflow services. I like the sections which cover items such as considerations for each design area (e.g. exception management, message endpoints, authentication, etc), as well as the considerations for each service layer. There are brief descriptions of common patterns, and a handy checklist for evaluating your service architecture.
Overall, a pleasant read. May not be breaking new ground for some of you, but if anything, this set of guides should encourage you to read about a particular architecture topic you aren’t that familiar with.
Technorati Tags: architecture
Richard Seroter's Architecture Musings 
Thanks Richard.
The guide mentions the Façade pattern. “Avoid chatty calls to the service, which can lead to very poor performance. Instead, use the Façade pattern to package smaller fine-grained operations into single coarse-grained operations”. Remember on your TopXml “BizTalk and WCF: Part III, Transaction Patterns” article where you had to create an extra WCF service to wrap around calls to the other three services to ensure the transactions worked? Well, it’s more an architecture pattern than a work around then 🙂 🙂
Any time that my ramblings can be tied to an actual pattern, it is quietly satisfying 😉